Well, we've begun out jump to our first destination, the Wynter System. It will take approximately a week to get there, apparently an essential constraint of spacial mechanics. Time spent in jumpspace can be boring so I headed back to the kitchen/common area of the ship, hoping to get to know some of my fellow travellers. This mership is quite large and carries numerous cabins and a few (very high-priced) luxury suites as well as some low-berth travel pods. According to the manifest, more than 30 people are travelling aboard the Uncanny and I look forward to meeting some of them. When I arrived in the common area I did not see anyone, so I looked around and was pleased to see every nook and cranny was meticulously clean. Many cargo and passenger ships could be quite filthy and I myself have journeyed on more than a few during my time in the Kobra Worlds Sector.
A nice array of plants, games, and food items were on the main table and the layout was very pleasing: not too small to make one feel trapped in, and not too large that it wasted too much cargo space within the ship. My tummy rumbled, and I began thinking about a meal....and a shower. This trip seems long already and yet I have months to go before arriving at home in Urbanos Sector. I am deeply concerned about the route we are taking but there is little choice: the whole lower arm of the Orion Spur us suffering from the supernova that blew many years ago.
In some ways I am really looking forward to heading back home; since I arrived in the Kobra Sector I've been working my tooshie off. One of the more difficult jobs I had was during the aftermath of the crash of the gravitic city named "Titan". It was the worst situation I ever had to deal with; millions of lives were lost when this disaster occurred and I will always remember the weeks of sweat, blood, and tears I shed directing my rescue 'bots to help the injured and trapped. I still have nightmares about it to this day.
While checking out the confines of this mership I ran across one of the engineering crew, a large lion-like alien that I knew to be a M'Norn. He introduced himself as Raby and he had a lovely, aromatic smell to him that was distinctly much like vanilla. He told me we were ready to jump and to return to quarters, which I did. I look forward to meeting the rest of the crew and passengers on our long trip across the stars.
I found myself lazing around the ship until I was called for my mandatory medical exam. Currently, the Uncanny has over two dozen travellers on board so it taken some time for the the ships' doctor (Mazzei Selse) to finally see me. Like most modern humans, I have various cybernetic and biological enhancements and it's the doctors job to maintain a baseline for these systems and to make sure the systems are safe to use in the environments we would be experiencing. I have several important enhancements, the primary one is for my brain, called "Cognito". It's a brain implant that increases cross-brain connectivity (which significantly boosts critical thinking and creativity), and expands raw intelligence by 15-20% above a baseline humans' brain. The hardware also increases a persons' memory capacity by up to 50%, depending on the subject as well as adding near-total recall of information. Cognito is a standard brain implant for most Kobra Worlders and also for citizens from planets with a very high tech level.
I have many fond memories of living on the huge city-planet Kobra World; the amazing scientific fields that the citizens and government excel at, the amazing complexity of a planet with over a trillion people, the various alien races that would come to visit (and sometime permanently live) on this world. I experienced some truly remarkable events and met many talented people while living there. My fondest memory is visiting a new friend, Chandra, at her spiritual commune in the sky. She worked as a missionary-liaison for the Communion of the Stars, a humanitarian neoChristian organization. Their facilities were astounding and I spent several hours there networking, making good future contacts within the organization.
As we made our way across the system to the local jump point, I spent most of the time in the main lounge of the ship as it has a extensive set of windows facing forward, allowing an unfettered view of the ships and stars nearby. It always amazed me how much orbital traffic that revolved around Kobra World but with a trillion people to feed, it made sense. As we approached our exit point I saw one of the larger merships, the KWS Guppy and its escorts. It looked like a mammoth bathtub and was surely carrying a huge amount of cargo, probably perishable foodstuffs from nearby agroworlds. The Guppy itself was an impressive site, completely dwarfing our small ship.
When I boarded the Uncanny, I found my cabin easily enough and stowed my gear. It would be a long trip so I packed for an extended stay on this medium-sized mership. My new cabin is roomy enough but its odd octagon shape has thrown off my feng shui. I then decided to explore the ship a little before we boosted for the jump point, While wandering, I found an exotic beauty in the corridor who was instantly recognizable by anyone from Kobra World. She was an up-and-coming porn starlet, Melissa Love and she is a Yitarian. I am guessing she's been in dozens and dozens of films and we chatted briefly; she was headed to the Euforix Station in the adjacent Sector and I told her I was headed home. I left her in the hallway as she searched for her cabin, but her spicy scent filled my nose all the way down to the Common Area.
I have many feelings about leaving Kobra World since it's has been my home for more than 10 years. I accomplished much during that time and saved many lives with my robot team. Once in orbit we passed through the Elysium Highport, a space station circling the planet; one of hundreds that service the space industry of the system. I was able to use their recreational facilities while aboard, including the zero-gravity pool. While there, I was able to meet several of my fellow travellers that would be with us on the Uncanny. I wasn't sure how many people had booked passage aboard the freighter, but I did notice a dozen low-berth containers in the hold when I looked over the ship. They aren't the normal low-tech "freezers" that you sometimes don't wake up from, they are the more advanced zero-tau pods and they keep the sleepers safe and unaging during the journey.
We safely left orbit and began our journey out of the Kobra Worlds Sector. I have fond memories here and will miss it.
ENTRY 001 CONTINUED
The biotechnology and AI development of Kobra World is the most advanced in the lower Orion Arm, and they make fabulous amounts of money in these two fields. Tissue engineering, advanced body parts cloning, cybernetics, and even total rejuvenation of the human body is possible on Kobra World, and its been this way for thousands of years. On KW you can literally live forever and these people are called "Methuselahs". Unfortunately this advanced technology has created some serious social problems on KW that needed to be addressed. Several hundred years ago, the Methuselah Council was created to deal with these issues. The Council only has authority over people 300 years or older. These undying people can amass an enormous fortune during their life and can wield extraordinary influence with those finances, so the Council was created to make sure those problems wouldn't crop up.
This is how it works, once you turn 300 years old you go on the "MET Watch List" if you continue to live in Kobra World region, and every 100 years you must donate at least half your total wealth to the planetary government of Kobra World. The
amount of money that Methuselahs give to the government is called "the
Gift", and accounts for nearly 10% of revenues in any one year. Nearly a two-thirds of the Council are self-aware AIs, most of who diligently watch the finances of anyone over the age of 300. They make sure that the rule of giving up half your wealth every century is self-imposed, otherwise the Council steps in and removes all a Methuselahs money altogether. Most septuagenarians follow the rules and avoid the extreme penalty of Forfeiture that the Council can impose. With a massive overpopulation of one trillion people, the Farris presidential administration has made the cost to achieve this immortality extremely expensive to the average person.
ENTRY 001
Hello, my name is Mereni de la Renata and I grew up on a farm world in the Urbanos Sector. However, for the last fifteen years I have been working in Search and Rescue (S&R) in the Kobra Worlds region, which is part of the disastrous Collapse Zone. A nearby supernova cause a massive trade and technology crash in the regions surrounding it, and my degree in robotics has been helpful in disaster zones like earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and the occasional civil war. I have several different types of rescue bots, in three different classes: low tech, medium tech, and ultra tech. The low tech bots are easy for me to maintain on worlds which have little or no tech support, while my most advanced ones are made out of pure nanotech bots and are extremely useful. However the nanos tend to be power hogs and have a limited lifespan, so for the most part I use my lower tech bots for my job.
Kobra World is truly an amazing place; it's a city-world just like Urbanos and the population here has reached an extraordinary 1+ trillion people. It's a very stable planet, politically and technologically, and it utterly dominates its neighboring worlds, most of which are low-tech agro-planets. With such an enormous population, there is very little empty space on the planet. I have taken several photos to show the enormity of this heavily over-populated worlds' predicament.
Well, we've begun out jump to our first destination, the Wynter System. It will take approximately a week to get there, apparently an essential constraint of spacial mechanics. Time spent in jumpspace can be boring so I headed back to the kitchen/common area of the ship, hoping to get to know some of my fellow travellers. This mership is quite large and carries numerous cabins and a few (very high-priced) luxury suites as well as some low-berth travel pods. According to the manifest, more than 30 people are travelling aboard the Uncanny and I look forward to meeting some of them. When I arrived in the common area I did not see anyone, so I looked around and was pleased to see every nook and cranny was meticulously clean. Many cargo and passenger ships could be quite filthy and I myself have journeyed on more than a few during my time in the Kobra Worlds Sector. 
